It’s a blessing in disguise, but pricing for mobile advertising is falling into a more reasonable realm. This article in AdAge outlines some of the developments in this regard. In the past, I’ve mentioned the challenges of the anecdotal and confusing “average CPM” for mobile advertising. But the good news here is that impression volumes are going up and prices are falling.

For a sage assessment of what’s been really going on with performance-based mobile advertising, I’ll revert to my college classmate, Eric Eller at Millennial Media:

“In the online world, there’s the long tail of medium and small publishers, and in mobile that’s developing as well,” said Eric Eller, senior VP-marketing at Millennial Media. “I think it’s that long tail that doesn’t have enough brand equity to stand on its own. Most of it is aggregated into performance networks, which is sold on a CPC [cost-per-click] basis.”

Of course, this is both a blessing and a curse for a mobile industry that’s pinned many hopes on mobile advertising revenues. With rising impressions and falling prices, will overall market revenues be able to climb to their expected highs? Or are these just the growing pains of a youthful industry.

Without getting into an involved discussion of mobile media, the mobile platform still faces numerous challenges. Even if performance is more integrated in pricing across the funnel, then we must now find a way to cram more impressions onto that tiny screen.